Tintin in America (French:
Tintin en Amérique)
Original publication dates: September 1931 – October 1932
First collected edition: 1932 (redrawn colour edition published in 1945)
Author: Hergé
Tintin visits: United States of America (Chicago, Redskin City)
Overall rating:
Plot summary available here.
Publisher's synopsis:
Tintin goes to America, to Chicago, the territory of gangster Al Capone; the world of cowboys and Indians and the Wild West. Undaunted, Tintin and Snowy make their way through hilarity and danger to yet another triumph of virtue over crime.Comments: With the success of
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and
Tintin in the Congo among the children of Belgium, Hergé was now able to realise his desire of taking his hero to North America. The author had been interested in the history and culture of the U.S. and, in particular, the proud Native Americans, since childhood. Although he had originally intended this story to function as an exposé of the oppression of the Native American Indians, his ultra right-wing editor at
Le Petit Vingtième, Abbot Norbert Wallez, instead wanted a story about organised crime in Chicago, which would highlight the corruption in North American society. Ultimately,
Tintin in America was written as a compromise between the two concepts, with the boy reporter beginning his adventure in Chicago, taking on the mob, before finding his way onto a Blackfeet reservation.
Tintin in America originally ran in the pages
Le Petit Vingtième between September 1931 and October 1932, before being collected into a single volume in late 1932. It was later redrawn by Hergé, with a number of minor changes, in the artist's more familiar
ligne claire style as a full colour album in 1945. It is this commonly available, redrawn version that I will be basing my review on.
The first thing that hits you about
Tintin in America is just how much more confident it is than the first two Tintin books. Right off of the bat, the story is a lot more gripping than either
Land of the Soviets or
Tintin in the Congo, with the boy reporter and his faithful dog, Snowy, being abducted by gangsters before the end of the first page! There's also a lot more humour to this story – and this time the humour is actually funny – with amusing dialogue and visual gags aplenty. Simply put, this is the first Tintin story that actually makes me chuckle.
The story has a more complex plot than its predecessors too and far more interesting villains, with the principal antagonist of the book's first act being the real world gangster, Al Capone – the only time that an actual historical figure appears in the Tintin books. In an early panel, Capone tells his men, in a direct reference to
Tintin in the Congo, how the boy reporter smashed his diamond ring in Africa, neatly filling the reader in on why Capone is out to get Tintin. Hergé's depiction of Capone is fairly faithful, I suppose, but then again, he could just as well be any generic, Capone-a-like mob boss really...
Of course, Capone himself was already in jail on tax dodging charges by the time that
Tintin in America saw publication, but that didn't stop Hergé from featuring him as an antagonist in this story.
However, about ten pages into the book, a new principal villain is suddenly introduced in the shape of Bobby Smiles, a gangster who is head of the rival gangs fighting Capone. From here, the story shifts gear into a pursuit tale, as Tintin chases Smiles from Chicago to the Native American reservation of Redskin City. I have to say that Smiles isn't a particularly memorable villain within the context of the series and nor is he a particularly threatening one, with his slim frame and spectacles giving him a rather bookish look...
Nevertheless, the pursuit of Smiles provides an excuse for a number of exciting incidents and escapes, and, in that respect, the character serves his purpose within the story well. He's also a much more three-dimensional villain than those who appeared in either
Soviets or
Congo, and I love the deliciously playful way in which he uses the names of famous American prisons like "Alcatraz" or "Sing Sing" instead of expletives. This colourful, prison-based language is not present in the original French language edition, however, and is something that the English translators, Michael Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, added themselves. Regardless, I really enjoy it and, actually, if you give it a go yourself, "Alcatraz!" is a pretty satisfying expletive to say.
In addition to the improved plotting,
Tintin in America features some fantastic artwork. Even in its original newspaper strip incarnation, there's an increased confidence and attention to detail in Hergé's artwork, as illustrated by this colour plate from the original book edition...
In the better known 1945 edition too, Hergé's art is fluid, wonderfully detailed and expertly staged. A number of panels jump out at the reader as fantastic examples of comic book art. For instance, in the panels where a speeding locomotive barrels towards Tintin, who is tied to the tracks, the artist comes damn close to actually drawing movement into his art...
Likewise, in the scene in which the drunken sheriff of Redskin City stumbles out of his office after having consumed a whole bottle of whisky, you get a wonderful sense of his clumsy and intoxicated gait...
There's some nice humour and social commentary in the fact that the sheriff collapses underneath a prohibition sign too.
However, the single most impressive panel of the entire book, in my opinion, is the one in which Tintin inches out onto a window ledge on the thirty-seventh floor of a Chicago skyscraper. The "camera angle" that Hergé chooses gives this panel a dizzying, vertigo-inducing quality that effortlessly conveys the perilous situation that the boy reporter now finds himself in...
The backgrounds too are nicely detailed throughout the book, with the artist capturing the expanse of the prairies or the teeming metropolis of the city really well. Mind you, the plains and deserts do look a little bit too green to be completely realistic...
Hergé's signature attention to detail and authenticity, which he would rightly become famous for, and which he began taking steps towards in
Tintin in the Congo, increased with this story. The official Tintin website tells me that, while preparing for
Tintin in America, the author consulted the book
L'Histoire des Peaux-Rouges by Paul Coze, which gave a detailed account of the various Native American tribes. This quest for authenticity and accuracy is particularly noticeable in the artist's depictions of the Native American's headdresses and the markings on their tepees. I've read, for instance, that the grumpy looking "Indian" sitting cross-legged in Redskin City has apparently killed at least one enemy, based on his feather...
Unfortunately, Hergé erroneously refers to the Native American tepees as wigwams, which are actually a very different looking dwelling.
I must say that the broadly sympathetic portrayal of the Native Americans that Hergé gives us – if we put aside his rather dated penchant for referring to them as "Redskins" – is, although relatively stereotyped, way ahead of its time. If you look at how America's native race was being depicted in contemporary cinema and books back in the 1930s, they were still cast as wild, ruthless savages, whom the "good guys" (i.e. cowboys and the U.S. Cavalry) had to kill. Hergé's take on the "Indian's" situation is much more progressive and nuanced, showing them to be an unfortunate people who had been pushed onto squalid reservations and were all too often exploited by the white man.
The oil industry too gets a ticking off in this book, with the quite brilliant sequence in which Tintin discovers oil beneath the Blackfoot reservation. This page provides, at once, a strong message about Native American land rights and some wry commentary on rampant capitalism...
This playful, but tremendously subversive, page arguably represents the most striking political statement that Hergé ever made in the series. Sadly, his message about the exploitation and destruction of Native American lands by the oil industry is every bit as relevant in 2017 as it was 1932, what with President Trump having recently given the go ahead to the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens the lands of the Meskwaki, Standing Rock Sioux, and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes.
While I've mostly sung its praises so far,
Tintin in America definitely has its flaws. For one thing, it is, like the two previous Tintin stories, still quite episodic in structure, which is, of course, a by-product of its origin as a weekly newspaper serial. The overall plot is, frankly, a meandering mess, with Tintin first pitted against Al Capone, who we are led to believe is going to be the book's main villain, before it suddenly shifts gear to deal with the pursuit of Bobby Smiles into Redskin City and an encounter with the Native Americans. Then, once Smiles is apprehended, some twenty pages before the end of the book, the story shifts gear yet again, with Snowy being kidnapped and held for ransom. From then on, the book is concerned with rescuing the terrier from his captors and wrapping up the criminal underworld generally, which Tintin achieves, resulting in a ticker tape parade through the streets of Chicago...
While each of the book's three "acts" are individually fun to read and very nicely executed by Hergé, they don't really hang together to form a cohesive whole. The end of the book comes quite abruptly too, without any real sense of climax.
In addition, there are remnants of the cartioonish violence that we saw in
Land of the Soviets, in which Tintin survives explosions and a train wreck that should've, by rights, killed him. While you might feel that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that in a comic strip adventure, this kind of cartoon-y violence is entirely missing from later books in the series and just doesn't feel very much like how Tintin should be to me.
Another complaint would be that there are quite a lot of unlikely coincidences early on in the story. Take, for instance, the moment when Tintin escapes from a gangster's car by sawing the door off – because, you know, the boy reporter just happens to have a saw on him! Hmmmm...
Tintin in America also features slightly less of Snowy's comedic and sarcastic rejoiners than
Congo did, which is a shame. Actually, while we're on the subject of Tintin's terrier, there's an anomaly regarding their relationship here, with the boy clearly able to understand the dog's dialogue on pages 8 and 9, and again on page 60 (reproduced here)...
Although Snowy has always been able to understand human dialogue and "speaks" himself, none of the humans around him can understand what he is saying. To them, the dog's dialogue presumably just sounds like canine barks and whimpers. It's only the reader who is able to understand Snowy. This is how it was in
Land of the Soviets and
Tintin in the Congo.
Tintin in America, along with the original black & white version of
Cigars of the Pharaoh, are the only books in the series in which Tintin can actually communicate directly with his canine companion (although the examples of Snowy being able to communicate with Tintin were removed from the redrawn colour version of
Cigars of the Pharaoh, leaving
Tintin in America as the only book in which it occurs). Clearly, the boy being able to understand his dog was something that Hergé was experimenting with, but which was ultimately dropped.
Something else I just want to quickly mention is that towards the end of the book, Hergé drops in a cameo of Roberto Rastapopoulos, who will feature heavily in the next adventure and who will go on to be a recurring villain in the series...
Overall, I like
Tintin in America a lot. It has its shortcomings, without doubt, and I've outlined those above, but you know what? I really enjoy this book in spite of those shortcomings. It has a charm and a pace that is infectious, while the scripting and humour is much tighter than in the two previous adventures. This is also the first story in which Tintin's sleuthing side begins to come to the fore and he's even cheekily referred to as "Sherlock Holmes" at one point, by the head of a kidnapping gang. The book represents a leap forward creatively and, for me, it marks the moment where The Adventures of Tintin really take off. There would be better books later on, of course, but this is the earliest adventure that I would confidently recommend to a newcomer to the series. Even with its shockingly badly constructed plot, I defy anyone to lose interest in the narrative as they read. This book is a ripsnorter!
I should just also note that, although
Tintin in America does follow on loosely from
Tintin in the Congo, it's not necessary to read that earlier book in order to enjoy this story. Indeed, for many, many years this was the earliest book in the series available in English speaking countries and I, for one, grew up believing that it was actually the first book in the series, rather than the third.